Unfortunately, this production of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt makes you wonder what all the fuss is about. A Pulitzer Prize play (2005), a veteran director and a cast that includes two of our finest actors, yet where was the ‘high drama’, the ‘mesmerizing’, ‘enthralling’, ‘gripping mystery’, as declared by every critic from the The New York Times to the Wall Street Journal? Perhaps expectations were raised too high; perhaps it was a premature opening night, but no one can seriously claim it had ‘the audience gasping’.
Set in the Bronx in 1964 in a Catholic school serving the Italian and Irish communities, the only black student (who we never meet) is dismissed from altar duty for drinking wine. The strict, disciplinarian principal Sister Aloysius (Sandra Prinsloo) has her suspicions raised by Sister James (Tinarie van Wyk Loots) that Father Flynn (Jeremy Crutchley) is a paedophile and was seducing this twelve-year old boy. Convinced, but without clear evidence, she proceeds against Flynn. As she puts it, in the pursuit against wrongdoing one takes a step away from God but in his service. As the script has it, we are never sure whether the real struggle is within the church itself – her actual motivation being to counter the priest’s modernising liberal influence. Certainty, we are told, is only an emotion.
For the script to work dramatically, we as audience have to constantly second-guess ourselves. The problem is that Prinsloo’s gravity trumps Crutchley’s airiness. You almost never doubt Sister Aloysius. Crutchley on the other hand exudes guilt. When at the end of the play Sister Aloysius declares how full of doubts she is, it comes as an unexpected and unsuccessful twist.
A faltering pace, stilted exchanges and static blocking, had the audience applauding the penultimate scene, mistaking it for the ending. Competence, even proficiency, but without flair, allows the drama to lapse into debate theatre. The clues in the script to the character of Sister James are not remotely matched by Van Wyk Loot’s reading of the part. Ilse Oppelt, who appears for one scene as the boy’s mother, was a welcome relief, picking up the pace, though the role of her character is deeply flawed. Accents shifted from American to Irish to South African. In fact, the leads were at their best when their accents did slip.
